Maundy Thursday 2022

“This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.”

 

Thus we begin the Triduum,

            the three liturgies of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday 

and the Great Vigil of Easter on Holy Saturday,

            three liturgies that in truth are three parts 

                        of one united liturgy stretching over three days.

 

I invite you to participate deeply in these three liturgies, 

to let your hearts be open to the full scope of meaning 

for the events we are commemorating, 

to follow Jesus as faithful disciples,

 

These liturgies are provided for us 

from the most ancient of times in the Church 

            as a means of devotion to our Lord

            and for nurturing our awakening

                        to the profound realization of our salvation.

 

It is not like coming to see or participating in the Christmas pageant,

                        which is so heart-warming and joyful.

But our participation here leads us to spiritual depths 

that cannot be underestimated or dismissed casually from our attention.

 

And so tonight, let us enter with the open hearts of devotion

            into this commemoration of the Lord’s Supper,

                        his last supper,

            in which he would change forever 

how we are to regard table fellowship with one another.

 

The importance of the narration of the events of Holy Week 

is reflected in the Gospels very clearly.

It is thought that when the Gospels were written down,

            they started with the Passion narrative

            and worked backward from there.

At least two full and long chapters in all four Gospels are devoted 

            just to the events of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday alone

                        not counting the entry into Jerusalem 

                        or the Resurrection stories.

Compare that with mere paragraphs for every other event.

 

Tonight we focus on 

          what Jesus did with the bread and wine of their table fellowship, 

how he transformed that forever 

and released through those common elements 

the grace of his abiding presence in a very material way.

 

Now we know that through sheer familiarity with the Sacrament

we lose the impact of the radical action 

that Jesus took in the midst of the meal.

 

He took the familiar bread and wine, part of most all their meals, 

bread and wine, which symbolized hospitality, nourishment, 

bread to strengthen 

and wine to gladden the heart.

 

He gave them the bread, and then when they had eaten it, he said, 

“This is my body.”

Whoops…

 

But then he gave them the cup, and when they had each drunk from it, 

he said, “This is my blood.”

“This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.”

 

Jesus took the common elements of most every meal

            and changed forever how we would look at them.

This is my Body.  This is my Blood.

            A mind-blowing way to look at the intimacy of love

                        that goes to the extreme of self-sacrifice,

                                                            of giving one’s life for another.

 

Jesus was presenting himself as the sacrifice,

            the lamb, whose life was taken, 

whose life blood was poured out in sacrifice.

 

The life of the animal that was sacrificed and eaten

was in the blood,

life sacred and precious, represented in the blood

and therefore reserved for God alone.

And so the blood must be thoroughly drained 

from the slaughtered animal

before it could be prepared and eaten.

 

Therefore how shocking to their sensibilities this must have been,

so that they could profoundly realize 

that they were taking within themselves the very life of Jesus.

 

But always, every day, it is a matter of one life ending for another to live.

This is involved in every meal,

                        life sacrificed so that I may live

                        right down to the every last lettuce leaf, sacrificed for me.

 

Were we to eat mindfully, 

            we would become aware of the intimate communion of relationship

                        going on between what’s on our plate

                        and what we are:

            the digested fuel for our bodies 

            and components being used by the body to generate new cells.

Biologically it’s an interconnection between self and environment

                                    down to the molecular level.

 

Every meal can be seen as a holy communion.

You are what you eat.

 

And we become what we eat.

            By the eating, his flesh and blood merge with ours

                        and we with his

            as a very concrete and physical and literal demonstration

                                    of saving grace 

                        thus transforming us into the form of our humanity

that has been utterly taken up into the heart of divinity.

The communion we share is communion with God,

and is union with God in Christ.

 

In John’s Gospel during the Last Supper,

the beloved disciple rests his head on the bosom of Jesus.

 

What a beautiful image that is!

            to lay our head, the part of our body most representing 

                        our mind, our thoughts, our self-identity, our consciousness,

            to lay our head on the heart of Jesus,

                        that huge, compassionate, all-embracing Heart 

of the Love of God Incarnate.

 

And so we eat and so we drink

            becoming, in our salvation, more and more like our Savior

 

where there is no distinction between who is greatest,

            who is the favorite, who will have the honored position

                        at the supper table of the Lamb

 

What happens next in tonight’s liturgy,

            the stripping of the altar.

We do this to create the starkly simple setting for the Good Friday liturgy,

            to have a space so sparse that the only thing to draw our attention

                        is the Cross, so that we may place devotional attention there.

 

And tonight as we do this stripping reverently and with devotion,

            the Altar Guild members will do this action.

 

This is so apt, because these are the ones who minister unseen,

            attending to endless details

so that all of us may experience the beauty of worship

            and our liturgies may flow with the grace of the Spirit’s Presence.

They too are worship leaders, 

                        as much as the lectors and acolytes and musicians and clergy.

 

But the stripping itself, here is a way 

            for you to entering into that very personally 

                                                            as you observe the action at the altar.

 

On that altar in the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Jesus

            all our sin, all our suffering, all the hurt of the world 

                        is stripped away.

May our hearts be like this altar, stripped and then scrubbed clean

            by Jesus and his intentional action of the cross –

dying in order to serve us most fully,

            to absorb our suffering,

            to take upon himself the sins of the whole world.

 

Let your heart be stripped of the grief, the fear, the woundedness,

            the suffering and the sin.

Let go of what Jesus has already drawn to himself 

            and returned as the new creation of Resurrection Life to you.

 

And so we are invited to be with Jesus during these liturgies of Holy Week,

            to watch, watching for just an hour at a time,

                        the usual length of a Sunday service.

In these liturgies we can draw even nearer to Jesus

            as we follow the events,

and offer our worship, our profound sense of awe and wonder,

                        the gratitude of our hearts.

 

Remember, the events of this week

            are the whole reason for Christ's coming.

THE one major purpose of Jesus' life

            was to lay it down, to die.

All the events prior to Holy Week -

            - all the miracles, all the parables, all the Sermon on the Mount

- all were only preliminaries, setting the stage for what was to occur now.

 

Each of us is faced with Jesus' death in a very personal way.

            - what that means to me.

The audacity of one human being 

            intentionally dying as a way to bring me into life.

 

This week is a love song from God to us, 

a hard love song, but the ultimate love song of deepest, fullest love.

How can we turn our backs on such love?

And how can we also express our love in return?